How To Target Keywords Using Links

After keyword research comes keyword targeting, an essential piece of the optimal SEO campaign for any type of business. In a nutshell, keyword targeting is optimization both on-page and off-page for the terms you found using keyword research. Without keyword targeting, there would be no way to actually rank in search engines for the keywords you spent time researching for.

Once your page has been optimized on-page for your target keywords, there’s not much to do to help your rank for these terms other than link building. But how do you effectively target keywords using links? Using anchor text.

Using The Anchor Text In Links To Your Advantage Effectively

Linking is more complicated than most people think. For a long time people have kept in mind that with links comes authority and good search engine rankings. That is true, make no mistake. But more recently Google has started placing a lot of importance on the actual link text. For example, in the following link, the anchor text is “Trafficke SEO Services”: Trafficke SEO Services. To effectively use your backlinks, your anchor text should be one of your target keywords found during your keyword research. Using this technique you can more easily target your main keywords in your SEO campaign and you can focus your backlinks on certain terms that you want to rank for so that you can achieve high search engine rankings with little linking effort.

A Warning

But using anchor text effectively isn’t that simple. Effective keyword targeting using links can only happen with good keyword research before it. If you chose to target only one keyword, which isn’t a bad decision for small sites, then you probably think it’s a good idea to use only that exact term as the anchor text when creating backlinks to your website. This isn’t a good idea. Although it is generally accepted by search engines that webmasters should link to their own content to help their rankings, it isn’t very smart to highlight all of the links you made to make them stand out from the natural ones, especially if you use techniques such as  forum posting, link purchasing and trading, and even blog commenting. Now this isn’t a problem for websites popular enough to get most of their backlinks completely naturally, as they already have some solid authority. The best way to avoid the problem is to change up your anchor text a bit. For example, if your target keyword is “top movie reviews”, you may want to change up your anchor texts as follows: “movie reviews by [your company]” and “free top movie reviews”. As you can see, adding more words to your anchor text is an option.

In conclusion, anchor text is a powerful tool that, paired with powerful backlinks, can be used to focus an SEO campaign on keywords that matter. This results in more search engine traffic coming in with less overall effort and time spent.

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